Here in Japan, there’s a ton of stuff you can use to warm yourself up against winter’s chill, including thermal undies, hot baths infused with ginger, and pocket warmers or kairo, which you can stick all over your body. But as well as applying heat to the outside, it’s also important to make sure you warm up your insides, and one way to do this is by consuming warming foodstuffs like hot soup and hot drinks.

This winter, the major craze is to slurp down a cup of hot chocolate with actual chili peppers floating in it! Check out these Twitter testimonials to find out what’s so great about this unusual beverage!

Tabasco, with its spicy and tangy flavors, is a popular condiment to put on pizza or pasta in Japan. The writers in our Japanese office love the hot sauce brand so much that they jumped at the chance to taste them in bean form…jelly bean form. That’s right, the Jelly Belly Factory has created Tabasco flavored jelly beans and they’re available in Japan!

But unfortunately, the flavor of Tabasco jelly beans can be summed up in one word: disgusting. At least that’s what our reporter told us after biting into one. He claimed that the flavor was just too close to the original, making for a terrible candy…which got us thinking. If Tabasco Jelly Beans taste too much like the real thing, maybe they’d taste delicious if used as a condiment…on pizza. And so our taste test experiment began.

Nothing beats a tiring day more than a home cooked meal after fighting the best and the strongest at the World Warrior tournament. The characters of Street Fighter II all need that crucial pick me up and no one gets it better than Dhalsim! His wife, Sally, is always there to supply him with the best homemade curry in the Street Fighter world! His yoga would never be as strong without a bowl of spicy goodness.

Now is your chance to obtain yoga powers in the same way Dhalsim originally did, with curry! From GEEK LIFE, comes Dhalsim’s Home Curry, a perfectly replicated home cooked curry, right down to that special touch from Sally!

As we’ve declared before, convenience stores are one of the many things Japan gets awesomely right. And out of all the conbini in Japan, one of the greatest things housed within the walls of popular convenience store, Lawson, isn’t found on the shelves, but nestled safely behind the counter. Yes, their perfectly plump, consummately crispy fried chicken dubbed “Karaage-kun” costs a mere 210 yen (US$2.05) for hot, salty bliss. With a heart full of love for Karaage-kun, we could barely contain our jealousy upon learning that Mr. Sato, the most…unique reporter from our Japanese site, was invited to the Lawson headquarters to try out their new grilled Hokkaido corn-flavored Karaage-kun.

And so Mr. Sato marched down to crispy chicken HQ, still rocking his post-apocalyptic haircut, to try our most favorite convenience store snack. Little did he (or we) know that he would also be presented with an ultra-top-secret fried chicken unfit to be consumed by children younger than 15 years of age.

The snack aisle of Japan’s convenience stores is a fiercely competitive marketplace, and just about every week sees the release of some new flavor of candy or potato chip trying to steal the spotlight from its rivals. But while many of these pretenders to the throne of snack foods are only on sale for a few months or even weeks, the spicy potato rings called Bokun Habanero have been on sale without hiatus for over a decade.

Still, you have to keep evolving in order to stay ahead, and next month will see the release of a new Bokun Habanero that’s 10 times hotter than the normal version.

A new brand of curry has recently appeared in Japan that’s entirely inappropriate for minors, or at least that’s the way it’s being marketed–we haven’t seen this many mature content labels grouped together since we last sent a reporter to the adult video store. The otherwise nondescript packaging is absolutely covered with R18 warnings in print both large and small, and in case that isn’t enough to tempt frighten underage eaters, the curry’s makers have even slapped a sticker in the corner that reads “for adults only.” Naturally, we were wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so we called in our most adult-minded taste tester to try it out.

Don’t worry. While the contents of the curry are too hot for children, we’ve censored the summary so that it’s entirely safe for work.Read More

According to recent Chinese market reports, a patron of a McDonald’s in the city of Guangzhou of the Canton Province, took his grievances over his overly spicy burger to the police, causing quite a commotion.

The disturbance took place in mid-August when a man went into McDonald’s for his dinner, ordering a Spicy Chicken Burger. On finding it much more spicy than the previous one he’d had, he reported it to the police!

The spicy chicken burger is supposed to be spicy, but its spiciness must have been so very unbearably distressful—a breach of his civil rights, even—that he felt he had to make a police report. Read More